Council News Vol. 7, no. 2

Priority-Setting at NIAID
The NIAID planning process is organized around two major, Institute-wide
planning meetings that engage the Institute director, scientific program heads,
and senior management staff in a collective effort to identify and establish
priorities for future research.
The process is designed in sequence with the federal budget formulation and is
thus focused two years into the future.
The first step is the Summer Policy Retreat, which provides a forum for planning
future scientific directions. Discussions from this retreat are then transmitted to
the NIAID advisory Council for feedback and input.
A Winter Program Review is then convened to consider the deliberations that
preceded it and define current gaps in knowledge, emerging public health
needs, and research opportunities.
Following the Winter Program Review, NIAID Divisions submit their proposed
initiatives to the budget office. The Institute director, in consultation with senior
management, then selects the initiatives that will become part of the budget
submission to the NIH director. These plans are also submitted to the NIAID
advisory Council for review.
Throughout the process, the Institute director and the Division directors meet
with national organizations, voluntary health organizations, and professional
societies. Focus groups are convened at scientific and professional society
meetings to receive further input. Input from patient groups occurs at the
community level through patient participation on local and national advisory
boards that provide advice to large clinical trials networks.
NIH's CENTER FOR SCIENTIFIC REVIEW ADOPTS NEW SCORING FOR
GRANT APPLICATIONS

Beginning in June, reviewers started
assigning priority scores between 1.0 and
3.0 to the top half of applications and
between 1.0 and 2.0 to the top quarter.
CSR made this move to help spread scores for the
best applications, better enabling NIH to discriminate among them.
The change adds another dimension to scoring by
increasing the importance of an application's rank
relative to others reviewed by the study section.

We will be closely monitoring the impact during
the next year.
Introducing a new scoring system requires NIH to
base percentiles for June on that review only as
opposed to its usual practice of using three review
meetings as the basis for calculating the rankings.
NIH will be phasing in its return to the threemeeting norm.
The Center for Scientific Review published a
notice in June on this subject. It's on the Web at
http://www.drg.nih.gov/review/scoring.htm.